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Ever so often a book of major import comes along which revolutionizes our thinking about the therapeutic process. The Interpersonal World of the Infant by Daniel Stern is such a book.
The title itself is a sort of enigma. Stern actually describes in coherent and meaningful ways the subjective world of the infant. Yet the title is the “Interpersonal World of the Infant”. Stern recognizes that in the two-person world of caretaker and infant interacting, a matrix exists which nurtures the psychological development of the infant.
Stern's conclusions shatter some of the misconceptions of early developmental theory based on analysis of adults. Mahler's (1) observations of mother-child interaction were early attempts to bring more rigor to our psychoanalytic formulations. But her formulations of development from autism to separation-individuation and finally object constancy, maintained the psychoanalytic bias of a long period of undifferentiation followed by self and other differentiation around the first year of life.
Stern's findings are very different. His primary contribution is that, an infant from the day of birth organizes its experience in interaction with its environment. The center of this organization is the sense of self.
In the first two-thirds of the book, Stern clearly and sharply delineates the stages of development. In the final third the reader must work a little harder as Stern is a little haphazard in sticking to his initial outline. This change in the structure of the book is probably due to his attempt to capture the complexity that emerges in the later psychological developmental stages of self. However, if read closely, one finds an exciting, consistent, and compelling theory that will forever change the readers view of infant development and certainly influence our understanding of our patients as adults.
Stern identifies four major domains of relatedness: emergent, core, intersubjective, and verbal. Birth to two years old marks the infant's emergent s